Chao-Yo Cheng

Dr Chao-yo Cheng is a political economist. Currently, he is a Lecturer in Quantitative Political and Social Research at Birkbeck, University of London, where he also serves as Director of the Postgraduate Social Research Programmes.

He is Co-Director of Birkbeck's Centre for Political Economy and Institutional Studies (CPEIS) and a Research Associate of the Institute of Crime & Justice Policy Research (ICPR). Before joining Birkbeck, Dr Cheng held fellowship positions at Tsinghua University (Beijing) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He received his MA and PhD in Political Science from Columbia University and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he was also a Fulbright Scholar. His research employs computational, quantitative and qualitative methods to examine questions in the political economy of development and institutions, with particular focus on authoritarian and Global South contexts. His current work investigates how central-local relations and local governance shape nation-state building and political control in post-1949 China, while also exploring applications of generative AI in social science research.

Research interests: Causal inference; social network analysis; social data science; comparative authoritarianism; political economy of development; race, ethnicity and politics; China, India and Southeast Asia